Briefing Papershttp://briefingpapers.co.nz
Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:04:14 +0000en-NZhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Saving local democracy: An agenda for the new governmenthttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/saving-local-democracy/
Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:04:14 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1631Local government is inhibited and enabled by central government legislation, policies, and relationships. As such, the election of a new (central) government is a good time to review policy settings for local government.

The previous government (2008-2017) systematically stripped back local government in New Zealand, reducing local democracy and treating local government as an agent of central government. Substantial amendments to the Local Government Act 2002 removed all suggestion that local and central government are in any way ‘partners’. Citizen input into local government was diminished, and councils’ roles were constrained. The purpose of local government was narrowed to the provision of services – rather than the ‘good government’ of or ‘well-being’ of a district. Ministers were given unprecedented intervention powers. These reforms ultimately privileged a narrowly-defined idea of efficiency at the expense of most other values (see Reid, 2016).

The overall effect has been to undermine the democratic nature of local government by diminishing the salience of councils. Local government continues to spend a very small proportion of public expenditure and has diminishing influence over issues that affect peoples’ lives. The reduction in formal opportunities through which citizens exercise voice, such as the removal of mandatory consultation on annual plans, risks a technocratic and managerial dystopia in which all engagement is focused on councils’ three-year Long Term Plans. In this view of the future, having signed off the Long Term Plan, citizens are expected to be passive consumers until the next three-year review comes around. The role of elected members in this vision is equally passive.

The challenge for the new government

The challenge facing the new Minister of Local Government is significant. The overall effect of nine years of incremental reform has left councils confused about their purpose; the role of locally elected representatives constrained; the citizen voice diminished; and the powers of ministers and central government officials to intervene in local affairs enhanced. It is a picture of increasing centralisation at a time when we need to be strengthening the role of localities and regions and valuing diversity. It is essential to ensure public authority is distributed and that we develop dispersed sites of policy making to promote innovation; we cannot depend on policy bureaux in Wellington to possess all the answers and chart our future development – the risks are too great.

Increasing centralisation is not only bad for civic participation (why participate in a political arena which is largely marginalised?), it damages innovation and is bad for economic growth. Important issues are at stake. Are we to have a substantive system of local government, through which citizens can shape local policies and programmes, or is it to be a system of locally elected officials with little more responsibility than playing ceremonial roles and acting as ATM machines for corporate style service delivery bodies? And what happens to politics at the national level if power is further centralised should local government lose its role, however symbolic, as a check and balance on central government.

The importance of the Local Government Act 2002 was the way in which it recognised councils’ existing broad mandate to improve the quality of life in their districts, cities and regions and make their areas attractive for investment. By providing opportunities for increased engagement it recognised the importance of active citizenships and how this is necessary not only for building trust in our public institutions at the sub-national level but also for New Zealand as a whole. It was a small step in the broader project of distributing power and strengthening the ability of citizens to build sustainable and resilient place-based communities in contrast to a “one size fits all” approach to policies imposed from the centre.

The challenge is not to simply restore the Local Government Act 2002 to its original form. The legislation was far from perfect. For a start it was too long; it was also too prescriptive, particularly in the decision-making provisions, and its approach to strategic planning stifled innovation. Neither did it result in fiscal decentralisation, although arguably it strengthened both managerial and administrative decentralisation. However, there are lessons that can be learned from its application that allow for enhancement. One of the issues for the new minister, however, will be the ability of the Department of Internal Affairs to shift from providing policy advice on how to strengthen central government oversight of local government to how to strengthen citizen oversight instead.

For the long run it is important that the approach should be a non-partisan one to avoid a future in which our local government system continues to be subject to major reform according to the whims of the incumbent Minister of Local Government. Under New Zealand’s existing constitutional arrangements local government could be abolished by a vote in parliament with the support of only 51% of MPs. Apart from the constant risk to local government’s role, status and powers it undermines the ability of our local democracies to be a counterweight to the government of the day. To provide local government with the certainty needed to make long term investments for their communities, and to play its role as part of our constitutional apparatus, some form of constitutional protection is required. For example:

entrench or ‘super entrench’ the Local Government Act 2002 so that any changes to the Act will require the support of 75% of MPs;

amend the New Zealand Constitution Act to include reference to the existence of local government;

create a Parliamentary Commissioner of Local Government – a non-political office to give effect to Parliament’s rather than central government’s interest in New Zealand having an effective system of local government.

The ‘gold standard’ however, would be the adoption of a written constitution that clearly sets out the status and role of local government. Palmer and Butler’s proposed constitution is an example of what this might look like (part 13, s.110).

If councils are to attract talented and enthusiastic local leaders then we need to be able to offer them something substantial to do, that is, the opportunity to make a real difference in their communities. The new government has a unique opportunity to create a local government system that is strongly ‘localist’ and brings citizens back into the public realm in a meaningful way – our civic culture demands it.

]]>Who owns the wai?http://briefingpapers.co.nz/who-owns-the-wai/
Mon, 12 Feb 2018 17:01:14 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1602Our political parties emphatically disagree on who owns freshwater in New Zealand. The National Party maintain no one owns the water. The Labour and New Zealand First parties say everyone owns it. The Māori, Green and Opportunities parties all emphasise that there are outstanding Māori rights in freshwater that need to be resolved.

Why does it matter? Firstly because water matters. Water is immensely valuable, in every way value can be defined: material, cultural, spiritual, economic. It’s also currently free for anyone to take, and its quality is in decline. Water is free not only for individuals to meet their reasonable domestic needs (domestic water charges are technically for the use of infrastructure), but also free for large scale commercial and agricultural use. Commercial users must obtain a consent from their regional council; these are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis, without charge, except for the charge of the consents process. It is, almost literally, a “free for all”.

Although water is available at no cost, businesses have been making money from it. Farmers in overallocated catchments have recently been making commercial trades of their water consents, and companies have been bottling New Zealand water for free and selling it for profit.

Whatever their differences, all our political parties agree the current system does not properly protect our waterways. The new Government will introduce a royalty on exports of bottled water, but create no other charges this term. Charging for water use, or taxing it, will challenge the line, clung to by former governments, that running water is not ownable. The question of water ownership will need to be addressed in the course of changing our water use regime.

Secondly, the question of ownership matters because property rights matter. Māori have a legitimate legal case here, under native title, a doctrine accepted and used in jurisdictions like Australia, the U.S. and Canada as well as (mainly over land) in New Zealand. Our most recent and significant native title case was over the foreshore and seabed, but native title has been part of New Zealand land law from the early colonial period. The argument for native title is simple in its essence: before colonisation indigenous peoples had proprietorial rights to the lands and other resources in their territories, and, unless lawfully revoked (for example by a fair sale), then indigenous peoples retain at least some of those rights.

The Treaty of Waitangi also reinforces the logic of native title. In Article 2 Māori were guaranteed “te tino rangatiratanga o o ratou wenua o ratou kainga me o ratou taonga katoa”, or, in the English version, “the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties” unless they wished to sell those properties.

There is a legal question over whether these property rights apply to running water. The common law (the law established by precedent), imported here from England, does not recognise ownership rights in freely flowing water. Flowing freshwater is classed as publici juris, free for all who can access it – like air and light.

However, the common law also recognises native title, and it is another question whether native title includes water. Native title in Australia and the United States includes waters, and various rights to water are protected as Aboriginal rights in Canada. Our courts in New Zealand have so far not had the opportunity to address this question directly. The Waitangi Tribunal, in its Stage One freshwater and geothermal resources inquiry, determined that Māori had rights akin to ownership in the freshwater resources of their territories at 1840. The Crown acknowledged that Māori have rights and interests in freshwater, but has not recognised claims to ownership.

Jacinta Ruru, a prominent legal academic, has identified four key questions that need to be answered in order to determine a native title right in a body of freshwater. Firstly, does native title apply to freshwater? Secondly, if so, does native title trump the common law principle of publici juris in respect to freshwater? Thirdly, when establishing the case for title over a particular water body: do the Māori group in question hold customary property interests over that water body? And lastly, has the Crown extinguished those rights by some fair means? (Ruru pp80-84)

Stage Two of the Waitangi Tribunal’s inquiry into freshwater is looking into how well the Crown currently recognises Māori rights and interests in waters, and will offer recommendations for reform. The hearings are currently on hold, but will resume once the new Government develops its freshwater policy.

It is likely that, as in previous cases, the Government will take an approach that legal historian Richard Boast calls “statutory pragmatism,” and describes as a tendency to negotiate political deals, then enshrine those deals in law. They need to do this well, or risk Māori going back to court. When forming policy, those involved will hopefully look hard at the issues in relevant past cases, such as the protractedproblems over consultation and allocation in the fisheries settlements, and the prohibitively high bar for establishing rights under the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 and its successor, the Marine and Coastal Areas (Takutai Moana) Act 2011.

It should be remembered through all of this, that the primary impetus for Māori political agitation over waterways, historically and in the present is certainly not financial greed, nor even the legitimate pursuit of their rights under law, but horror at the degradation of water quality and water flow. The history of Māori protest in relation to water shows long decades of concern about the loss of mahinga kai to pollution, and the shrinking and engorgement of rivers and lakes for power generation and irrigation. The Ministry for the Environment consulted widely with Māori in early 2005 on water issues and noted:

One of the most striking and consistent themes to emerge from the hui is the anger, pain and sorrow many Māori individuals and communities feel due to the current state of New Zealand’s freshwater resources … Many things underlie these feelings – pain at the damage which has been caused to Papatūānuku (the waterways are seen as her veins) and the mauri of waterways, the cultural offence caused by practices such as sewage and effluent discharge, the damage to and loss of mahinga kai, damage to the health of those who rely on that mahinga kai, the loss of cultural wellbeing caused by degradation of the mauri of the waters, the cumulative effects on all aspects of wellbeing and much more.

Mainstream media presentations of this issue very seldom cover the important legal and historical issues relating to water ownership, though they revel in its controversial politics. Māori have a perfectly legitimate case to rights in freshwater, and this country need not be afraid of it.

]]>Rebooting biculturalism in Aotearoa-New Zealandhttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/rebooting-biculturalism/
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 17:04:27 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1599The idea of biculturalism gets a lot of airtime in Aotearoa-New Zealand, but it hardly seems popular. Some argue biculturalism should be replaced by multiculturalism, as a more accurate reflection of the national situation today. Others see biculturalism as ‘not Māori enough’ and would prefer to talk about Kaupapa Māori. Anyone who studies for a range of professions including teaching, nursing and social work is taught and assessed on ‘biculturalism’ as part of the curriculum. Yet very few seem clear on what biculturalism actually means. Many people in Aotearoa-New Zealand would put ‘biculturalism’ in a category that includes the Treaty of Waitangi, equity, diversity and inclusiveness. I think the best explanation is to understand biculturalism as a relationship in which the social and intellectual histories of two (or more) peoples are intertwined over many generations.

The ideas of equity, diversity and inclusiveness still hold a time-honoured place in our national imagination, supported by the fundamental Kiwi philosophy of giving someone a ‘fair go’ – but many influences, especially saturating our airwaves with globalised US-dominated cultural products and ideas through television and the internet, have all but untied even the last remaining shreds of this once-distinctive fabric of Kiwi fairness and tolerance for difference, down-under. For the bicultural historical relationship between Māori and Pākehā has been a love affair as well as a power struggle – whether or not one believes that one side of this binary is possible without the other. New Zealand today can be understood only within the history of this relationship. Certainly Pākehā would not be where they are now without the land they acquired cheaply from its Māori traditional owners, and developed using decades of poorly-paid Māori labour, often on their own ancestral lands, to lay the foundation of hugely profitable primary industries (Willmott, 1989).

Biculturalism is an indelible part of the social landscape and national discourse of Aotearoa-New Zealand, given our history and identity as the country with the ‘best race relations in the world’, and the popularity of ‘Māori’ amongst the peoples of the world. Our national anthem became ‘bicultural’ in the 1980s, and our national greeting became ‘kia ora’ at around the same time. The Māori factor makes ‘brand New Zealand’ unique in the global market. Don Brash and others may call for ‘the end’ of the ‘Māori problem’ but arguably it is a simple political stunt: they know full well how much the ‘Māori brand’ is worth to themselves and their capitalist friends (Webster, 1998). Therefore the nature and control of Māori representation in media and public discourse is a matter of ongoing political significance, requiring sound theoretical underpinning by critical academic research and scholarship. I argue for a radical form of biculturalism, as a profoundly educational concept for Aotearoa-New Zealand. The term ‘rebooting biculturalism’ captures my aspiration to catalyse more widespread and fruitful discussions.

Biculturalism takes a unique form in each social context. For this reason, I argue we cannot learn much from international literature about biculturalism in Aotearoa-New Zealand, where the Māori-Pākehā relationship is primary. Since the beginning of that relationship, Māori have had no choice but to be bicultural, reflecting the general rule that only members of the dominant group can ignore ethnicity, and the concepts such as biculturalism that ethnicity brings with it, in a multicultural (or, more precisely, multi-ethnic) society.

The intercultural hyphen is a useful model of biculturalism in a country like Aotearoa-New Zealand, founded on a specific indigenous-settler (Māori-Pākehā) relationship (Stewart, 2016). For example, the three phrases just used—indigenous-settler, Māori-Pākehā, Aotearoa-New Zealand—each consist of two ‘identity’ terms connected by a hyphen: the point of the ‘intercultural hyphen’ model is to draw attention to what connects two groups or perspectives. The hyphen is a symbolic ‘gap or bridge’ that captures the paradoxical nature of the bicultural relationship, with a range of options for engaging or disengaging across the hyphen from either side. The intercultural hyphen symbolises the ‘something new’ of a bicultural relationship that is not the same as either of the original cultural groups.

A marker of the relationship between two generalized groups, the hyphen has been erased, softened, denied, consumed, expanded, homogenized, and romanticized. The discursive hyphen has stood in for an unbridgeable chasm between the civilized and the uncivilized; it has marked a romantic difference between the innocent noble savage and corrupt Western man; it has held the gap between the indigenous subjects of study and their objective White observers (Jones & Jenkins, 2008, p. 473).

The concept of biculturalism carries with it a challenge to the dominant culture in the form of incommensurable difference, the limits of Western knowledge, and the theoretical notion of the Other: biculturalism by its nature is unsettling and at times uncomfortable. Since learning, in the sense of ‘deep’ learning, is by definition challenging to the learner, ideas that challenge us are inherently educational for the monocultural nation-state. What we might learn in the bicultural space is not necessarily what we are prepared to know.

Through their links to large historical and social processes, schools and education institutions have important connections to biculturalism, but they cannot ‘contain’ biculturalism, which is an important topic in its own right. Biculturalism is a fundamentally educational concept, seeing ‘education’ here in a larger sense that transcends formal institutions such as schools and universities. Healthy debate and engagement with biculturalism provokes our nation into being a learning society, with an openness to possibilities for human flourishing. Many more Pākehā are telling their stories about why learning te reo matters to them. There is a new spirit of optimism stirring in the country: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s commitment to spending five days at Waitangi for the commemoration of Waitangi Day 2018 is just one hopeful sign of the important role biculturalism might yet come to play in our national future.

]]>Immigration reform spotlight: Fairness, economic development, and the Working Holiday Schemehttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/immigration-reform-spotlight/
Mon, 18 Dec 2017 16:58:27 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1581Historically high net migration to New Zealand — which reached over 70,000 annual arrivals in 2017 — has spurred many social and political concerns, including about how the country’s already-strained public infrastructure will cope in the coming years. In response, the newly-elected Labour-New Zealand First coalition government plans to significantly curb net immigration by 20,000-30,000.

For most of its history since 1840, New Zealand was a British settler society — that is, a country of predominately permanent migration — until the 1980s shift toward human-capital focused migrant entry criteria based particularly on education, age, and skill; and the implementation in the early 2000s of a defined pathway to residency for short-term migrants.

These reforms helped to bring about the ethnic “superdiversity” New Zealand has today. Temporary labour migrants are now an increasingly important part of net migration to the country, with temporary work visas granted annually increasing by 600% over the last two decades from about 30,000 to nearly 200,000.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, as a 2014 OECD report states, “permanent migration [now] mainly draws from the pool of temporary labour migrants”. Indeed, among OECD countries, New Zealand has one of the highest proportions of its labour force represented by temporary labour migrants, estimated at approximately 3.6% in 2014.

Overall, though, very little is known about these migrants and in a sense they remain “invisible” in public debates and in research, in part because official statistics tend to account for permanent residents.

New Zealand is not unique in this regard. The global migration context has changed significantly. Temporary labour migration is intellectually topical and hotly debated once again, recalling the discourse around post-second world war guest worker programmes in Europe. Many developed countries are seeing record high migration flows in part due to enlargement of the European Union, the unprecedented refugee crisis, and other factors.

As Martin Ruhs puts it, the paradoxical market demand for and widespread unethical treatment of “invisible” temporary labour migrants is “one of the most controversial policy issues” today globally. As public political debates show, temporary labour migrants can be either “‘development heroes’ for their countries of origin, ‘villains’ that threaten the jobs and welfare of workers in host countries, and/or ‘victims’ of exploitation by people traffickers, recruiters, and employers”.

In New Zealand, the Working Holiday Scheme (WHS) is responsible for about one third of all temporary labour migrants; cuts to immigration numbers of the magnitude promised will be difficult without affecting this scheme.

The WHS was implemented in 1985 with an initial bilateral reciprocal agreement with Japan, and it has since expanded to include 44 partner countries, generally allowing youth aged 18-30 to work and holiday for 12 months in New Zealand.

Who are these working holiday makers? Three quarters arrive from high-income OECD countries such as Germany, the UK and France. The limited research on these migrants also indicates that they mostly work in hospitality, tourism and agriculture — particularly accommodation, food services, horticulture, and viticulture — all of which are relatively low-skilled, low-paid and highly seasonal jobs. They may work on average two-to-three roles during their stay, with median gross earnings of around $9000.

There are several important issues to consider. Firstly, some employers in tourism, agriculture, and hospitality may be problematically dependent on working holiday makers to meet their seasonal demands, which may in turn be compromising New Zealand’s long-term economic stability. How would employers in these industries fill their labour shortages if the new government decides that curbing net immigration must also involve downsizing the WHS?

Secondly, evidence suggests that many working holiday makers are treated unfairly. A 2012 study found that foreign seasonal workers in Motueka were underpaid, overworked, and discriminated against by gender or race. This trend is global, with a recent Australian Senate investigation labelling the exploitation of temporary workers a “national disgrace”.

Underlying the issue of unfairness is that not all working holidays are the same. Participants from high income countries tend to work less than half of their time and may more willingly accept mistreatment – they may be thought of as “lifestyle migrants”. By contrast, those participants from lower-income backgrounds tend to spend over half of their time working rather than holidaying. For them, even poor contracts and low wages may be an improvement on their home situation. Who, if anyone, experiences the ideal “working holiday” in New Zealand?

Continued reporting and monitoring of how temporary labour migrants are treated, including through further research, must be encouraged. The previous National government has made a good start by issuing large fines to and blacklisting exploitative employers.

Preventing exploitation may also mean providing new job opportunities through state level support of high value creative export products, services and technologies (such as videogame development), in line with the OECD’s idea of innovative “green growth”. Their recent (2017) report suggests, pointedly, that New Zealand’s growth model “largely based on exporting primary products, has started to show its environmental limits” given its known negative impacts on natural resources.

Indeed, as a recent joint Australian National University and World Bank report shows, in regards to the work holiday schemes in Australia and New Zealand, “access and prerequisites are biased in favour of developed countries”. Moreover, “this bias denies Pacific migrants access to a migration pathway that could result in permanent residence or a temporary skilled work visa”.

The new government could consider extending the WHS to Pacific Island nations, but the eligibility requirements may have to be appropriately adjusted, for example by lowering the minimum required level of savings while retaining the need for evidence of a return ticket. In turn this may help enable the upskilling and training of Pasifika youth through short courses and Kiwi work experience while New Zealand labour market needs continue to be met. Widening the Scheme to our Pacific neighbours could also help to uphold the desire of some nations strongly affected by climate change, such as Kiribati, to have avenues for “migration with dignity”; this will be particularly important as the new government proceeds with its plan to implement the world’s first humanitarian visa for climate refugees.

In conclusion, I agree with McLeod & Mare’s argument that temporary labour migration may not be negatively impactful “in aggregate,” but that “temporary migration should not be viewed as a blanket or permanent solution to labour shortages and policy settings should not be immune to scrutiny or review.” Ultimately, there is a need for both scholars and politicians to address issues of fairness and economic development around the WHS, and for a zero tolerance of exploitation.

]]>New Zealand media ownership: History and obfuscationhttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/new-zealand-media-ownership-history-and-obfuscation/
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 17:03:55 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1567This year’s New Zealand Media Ownership report written by Merja Myllylahti and published by the Journalism, Media and Democracy research centre (JMAD) recounts how two attempted mergers failed. The Sky TV–Vodafone and NZME–Fairfax mergers were prevented by the Commerce Commission (in the latter case an appeal is before the High Court).

These events are of major importance for New Zealand citizens and consumers. A successful Sky-Vodafone merger would have allowed the combined company to control mobile and broadband access to the premium sports content market. An NZME–Fairfax monolith would have controlled half of the commercial radio market, 90 per cent of daily newspaper circulation and most online traffic to and from online news sites.

Yet, amidst these developments the historical patterns of New Zealand media ownership were not openly discussed by politicians or journalists. How has the possibility of mega media mergers eventuated and why this has attracted minimal public attention?

From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, the national media landscape was hollowed out by transnational corporations under a neoliberal policy regime instituted by Labour and National governments, as was happening to the entire economic system. Before Labour’s July 1984 election victory there was a shift from family to corporate press ownership, an expansion of private commercial radio and the formation of a semi-independent broadcasting system incorporating radio and television.

In 1980, 31 of the 33 daily newspapers were owned by Independent Newspapers Ltd (INL), Wilson and Horton and New Zealand News. Corporate raider Ron Brierley had a four per cent holding in New Zealand News and purchased Hauraki Enterprises, a controlling shareholder of Auckland radio stations Radio Hauraki and Radio I.

From 1984 to 1987 the fourth Labour government deregulated the finance sector, reduced tariffs and floated the New Zealand dollar. Corporate mergers and acquisitions thereby accelerated and the new media capitalists gained transnational connections. In March 1987 Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp obtained 40 per cent of INL; during 1989 its holdings increased to 49 per cent.

In August 1990 the Commerce Commission approved a further expansion in Newscorp’s INL holdings. Transnational patterns of cross-media ownership were enabled by the deregulation and commercialisation of broadcasting (1989), the entry of TV3 and pay television (1989) the sale of Telecom (1990) and the lifting of restrictions on foreign media ownership (1991).

Subsequently, TV3 was acquired by Canadian media conglomerate Can West; Sky became controlled initially by Time-Warner and Telecommunications Inc along with Bell Atlantic and Ameritech. The latter two companies also gained a controlling share of Telecom.

In 1996 Radio New Zealand’s 41 station commercial network was sold to a consortium of Wilson and Horton, the United States radio giant Clear Communications and APN News and Media. The latter company was part of Tony O’Reilly’s holdings in Australia and the United Kingdom. From 1995 to 1998 his newspaper group, Independent Newspapers Plc (later called Independent News and Media,or INP) assumed control of Wilson and Horton, New Zealand owners of the New Zealand Herald. From there transnational media ownership developed an Australian dimension.

In 1999 Newscorp-controlled Independent Newspapers Ltd extended its media holdings into Sky television. In 2003 Fairfax Holdings paid NZ$ 1.88 billion for INL’s press and magazine titles. At that time Fairfax was Australia’s largest print and media group and was valued at A$10.2 billion. In 2006 the company paid NZ$700 million for Trade Me in order to increase its on-line holdings, exploit electronic commerce and to capture the migration of classified advertising to the internet. It is worth mentioning here the absence of legal scrutiny. A few major players were dominating domestic media markets when there was no media-specific competition law.

Remarkably, this destruction of national media institutions along with the underlying structure of economic sovereignty did not meet sustained opposition. These fundamental changes were obscured by Labour’s 1984 election triumph, the demonisation of the defeated Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, the apparent consensus of the August 1984 Economic Summit and the entrepreneurial nationalism associated with Michael Fay and David Richwhite’s KZ7 Americas Cup campaign. And, most crucially, the entire language of economics was colonised by the rhetoric of free markets and market forces.

New Zealand’s Keynesian, social democratic welfare state became the relic of a discredited past. This meant that there was no collective basis for defending the poor and marginalised. They were merely the casualties of necessary reform, the government’s role was to help them help themselves. The free market colonisation of economic language was enabled by a mainstream media-communication system whose various components were largely dependent on advertising revenue, the commercialisation of news content and the repatriation of profits offshore.

Matters did not substantially improve under the Labour led governments of 1999-2008, who believed there was a ‘third way’ between the extremes of market liberalism and state interventionism. However, the plausibility of this policy course depended on newly coined terms such as ‘new social democracy’, ‘partnership’, ‘innovation’ and the ‘knowledge economy’. Meanwhile, our economic past was reinvented by a narrative that described pre-1984 New Zealand as a fortress economy or Gdansk shipyard which needed radical overhaul.

The conflation of social democracy based on the rule of law with Eastern European one party statism was pure fantasy, yet, many former Labour politicians and ministers still believe this: in Radio New Zealand’s recent Ninth Floor series former Prime Minister Helen Clark depicted pre-1984 New Zealand as a Western Albania.

From this point of view the related issues of economic and national media sovereignty cannot be comprehended.

From 2008, with the election of a National government under John Key, reinventions of the economic past were no longer necessary. The new Prime Minister exuded a down-to-earth, non-political outlook devoid of any historical memory. His biographer John Roughan observed that, ‘Key is not a reflective man, given to dwelling on his own past or that of the country he governs. He is attuned to the present, trusting the instincts that served him richly in foreign exchange markets and safely so far in government’. Roughan further noted that Key had, ‘a currency dealer’s sure sense of the mood and movement of the market at the moment although he is less sure in his long term view’. The implication here is that the short-termist culture of financial trading fits the requirements of political leadership and that John Key’s attributes demonstrate this.

Just as John Key exemplified and naturalised finance culture, finance capital came to pervade the corporate media system. From about 2007, financial institutions assumed shareholder control of major media corporations. Previous JMAD media ownership reports (2011-2016) detail how financialisation increasingly affected the New Zealand holdings of four major corporates – Fairfax, Sky TV, APN News and Media, and Media Works.

The general results have been catastrophic for those committed to public sphere principles.

Newsrooms contracted, news content thinned out, and current affairs journalism disappeared from prime time television. We have an overbearing convergence of finance, political and media culture which obscures the issues of media ownership.

Recent developments though are, potentially, more hopeful.

The Commerce Commission has stood against extreme manifestations of ownership concentration on the grounds of media pluralism and democracy.

The newly elected government has promised to advance the principles of public broadcasting in a multi-platform environment, by supporting Radio New Zealand. But what about the rest of our media environment? Will Cabinet address the obvious shortcomings in media competition law? This would require some understanding of how transnational concentrations of media ownership damage democratic principles and our national identity.

Such an understanding is unlikely to be found among the Prime Minister’s ‘third way’ Labour advisers.

]]>Changing climate, changing mindshttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/changing-climate-changing-minds/
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 17:02:45 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1433New Zealand’s new government – and especially Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – takes climate change very seriously. But the long-term success of this government’s climate policies will still require a broad-based public support, and in particular a continued decline of the climate denialism that has impeded action in the past.

Climate psychology is a rapidly growing field with all sorts of interesting insights about why people resist the evidence for climate change, and why people don’t act decisively once they accept the facts. I think this is an immensely useful body of knowledge, but it needs to be interpreted carefully. It is far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions from empirical insights, or the wrong practical recommendations.

One common example is to blame climate denial on mental heuristics—that is, intuitive rules-of-thumb that we rely on to effortlessly form judgments. However, for most people, heuristics are also involved in climate belief. One is the source heuristic, which gives credence to where information comes from: “If scientists say the climate is changing, it must be true”. Another is the consensus heuristic, which gives credence to beliefs that are widely shared: “There is consensus among scientists and within my community, so it must be true.”

The role of heuristics in climate belief is hardly surprising, because one of the basic points about heuristics is that most people use them for most judgments most of the time. Few people have the time or capacity to read and make sense of the IPCC’s voluminous Assessment Reports, so most people instead rely on cognitive short-cuts. But this is swamped by a more familiar framing of the climate debate of rational believers versus impulsive, irrational deniers.

Another example is research on political orientations, a critical factor in climate belief. A 2016 meta-analysis of existing research found that: “The largest demographic correlate of climate change belief is political affiliation. People who intend to vote for more liberal political parties are more likely to believe in climate change than those who align themselves with relatively conservative political parties.”

From these broad brushstrokes, however, a great many conclusions can be drawn. One gloss was given recently by Dave Hansford for The Spinoff. It is a great piece by a great writer, but warrants further scrutiny.

His central claim is that: “The strongest predictor of climate change denial… is a libertarian, free-market world view.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide supporting citations, so I will sidestep a few burning questions, such as whether he sees any difference between the libertarian and conservative traditions that he tends to blend together, where he places the libertarian worldview on the liberal–conservative continuum that is typically measured in surveys, or what relevance he hangs on the distinction between political ideology and political affiliation.

My focus here is the picture of denial that he paints. Implicitly, he aligns with a longstanding tradition in social psychology of treating conservatism as a pathology, as a disease that produces malign symptoms, one of which is climate denial.

But this can’t be entirely right. The case of Margaret Thatcher is instructive. She was a self-identifying conservative, indeed she even led British conservatism into an awkward alliance with libertarianism. But she was also a trained chemist, so accepted mounting evidence about climate change. In 1989, she warned the United Nations General Assembly about “change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.” For her, obviously, conservatism wasn’t incompatible with climate change belief.

And why wouldn’t a conservative be worried? If conservatism’s essential trait is its cautiousness about change, then why wouldn’t conservatives want to prevent a great disruption to traditional ways of life? Green conservatives take something like this approach (see John Gray, Roger Scruton or an obscure book by Gordon K. Durnil), as did Thatcher. Even her eventual volte-face, apparently under the influence of lobbyists, had less to do with rejecting the science and more to do with her fears that climate politics had become “a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” Her alarmism is exaggerated, yet it’s worth noting that the breakdown of the 1992 Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen in 2009 has been convincingly blamed on its “top-down” structure, its insensitivity to the complexities of the wicked problem that it attempted to fix, in a way that resonates with libertarian and conservative critiques of centralised, rationalist governance. Insofar as the Paris Agreement is an improvement upon Kyoto, it is so precisely because it gives greater weight to “bottom-up” approaches, particularly through the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Why does this all matter? It matters because of the practical upshots we might draw from climate psychology. In his Spinoff piece, Hansford is strikingly pessimistic. Reflecting on the human capacity for motivated reasoning and post hoc rationalisation, he draws the gloomy conclusion that “enlightenment will come one funeral at a time”. In other words, climate deniers are a lost cause. All we can do is exclude them from the political process, by dint of mortality or majority.

But what if, actually, it’s the policies and framings that are the problem? What if it isn’t the facts of climate change that are getting in the way, but people’s sincerely-held fears and anxieties about the anticipated implications of the low-emissions transition? What if the climate debate isn’t connecting to their particular moral concerns, or their sense of what constitutes a sensible or legitimate solution? And what if we all miss out on insights and allegiances because certain political orientations are treated as inconvenient and unreformable?

(I note, in passing, that the idea of a carbon tax slides all over the political spectrum, endorsed today in the US by libertarians and neoconservatives as more effective and less bureaucratic than emissions trading. This isn’t only opportunistic either, harking back to Friedrich Hayek’s commitment to the polluter-pays principle. In The Road to Serfdom, which Thatcher reputedly carried in her handbag, he took it as obvious that environmental harms should be directly regulated through a “price mechanism”.)

To treat climate denial as merely a facet of psychology, then to treat psychology as innate and non-adaptive, is to give the game away. If climate change is a problem for everyone, for the right as well as the left and everyone in between, then we ought to have something serious to say to them all. Sure, some people might never be convinced, but the growing acceptance of climate change shows that public perceptions do evolve, and the story of Thatcher show how far we might go.

In my view, climate psychology shouldn’t be used to shut people out or shut people up, but as a resource for truthful persuasion, for connecting climate science to people’s sincerely held values and commitments. Given the fact of political diversity, this will take different forms depending on whom one is talking to. For some, climate change will be a threat to tradition and community. For others, a threat to individual choice, freedom and future profits. For others, a threat to rights, equality and social justice. Engaging with these diverse values will produce disagreement, of course, but it’s better to disagree over solutions than over whether the problem exists at all. We’ve spent long enough on that.

—o—

The author would like to thank AUT’s School of Communications and The Policy Observatory for supporting attendance to the MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory in Manchester to develop these themes.

]]>Rethinking the teaching of economicshttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/rethinking-the-teaching-of-economics/
Mon, 27 Nov 2017 17:03:00 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1523In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, some students of economics in countries as diverse as Chile, the UK and the US asked why the curriculum they were studying at University did not deal with contemporary issues such as debt and finance, or the shortcomings of markets. Some academic economists, too, were unhappy with a curriculum they judged as lacking in relevance, history and challenging ideas.

One attempt to address these problems is the CORE project – Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics. A collaborative project with economists from India, Chile, Colombia, Turkey, the UK and the US, the CORE curriculum and textbook puts more emphasis on real world problems and less emphasis on free-market doctrines.

The project has received some funding from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and is coordinated by Sam Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute, Wendy Carlin of University College London, and Margaret Stevens of Oxford University. It has received some favourable media coverage, for example here, here, and here.

The Economist described the approach of the textbook, The Economy, thus:

It begins with the biggest of big pictures, explaining how capitalism and industrialisation transformed the world, inviting students to contemplate how it arrived at where it is today. Messy complications, from environmental damage to inequality, are placed firmly in the foreground. It explains cost curves, as other introductory texts do, but in the context of the Industrial Revolution, thus exposing students to debates about why industrialisation kicked off when and where it did. Thomas Malthus’s ideas are used to teach students the uses and limitations of economic models, combining technical instruction with a valuable lesson from the history of economic thought. “The Economy” does not dumb down economics; it uses maths readily, keeping students engaged through the topicality of the material. Quite early on, students have lessons in the weirdness in economics—from game theory to power dynamics within firms—that makes the subject fascinating and useful but are skimmed over in most introductory courses.

The CORE curriculum does not reserve complexity until high level study. Too often introductory courses in economics involve assumptions – about individuals, firms, markets and governments – that perceptive students know are just not true. Individuals are not always rational, firms do not always aim for profit maximisation, markets are not always efficient allocators of resources, and government activity doesn’t always crowd out the private sector. With CORE, complexity is present at the beginning. As one teacher of CORE writes,

…[E]conomics has within it an extremely effective language that helps us explain the social world. But much of it is hidden behind a wall of mathematical formalism, reserved for graduate students and the energetic junior faculty who want to teach it.

An example is the question of incomplete contracts in the labour market: what happens, for example, when someone hires you, but can’t monitor you 24/7, and so has to trust you’ll do the job? This is a ubiquitous problem: for most of us, it’s a basic experience of making a life. But introductory [economics] courses pretend it doesn’t exist and then, understandably, perceptive students feel cheated. As far as the standard presentations go, it’s too advanced to cover.

CORE flips this. Incomplete contracts in the labour market appear in CORE’s Unit 6. There’s a huge amount of effort and rethinking to get this material in ways that newcomers can understand.

Contrary to initial concerns that students who are introduced to economics through this method may be disadvantaged if they then decide to pursue an economics degree, there is some (early) evidence from University College London (UCL), that students who took the CORE course did better in subsequent economics classes than earlier cohorts who took a more traditional introductory course. In addition, anecdotally at least, students seem more engaged in CORE courses.

Critique and an Alternative

CORE is not “the only game in town”, and it has been criticised. CORE and other recent curriculum initiatives were assessed in a 2016 working paper, which claimed their reforms were ‘minor and superficial’. The criticisms seem to centre on the following question. Are the proposed changes focused on making economics teaching more relevant, by showing that economics concepts and methods are helpful in analysing real world problems, or is it instead about taking a deliberately multi-disciplinary and integrated approach to analysing, and trying to find solutions to, the world’s “wicked problems”? It could be both, of course, but criticisms of approaches such as CORE and its counterparts appear to accuse them of adopting the first approach, which the working paper authors deem inadequate and insufficient.

But of course, most students studying economics in New Zealand are not training to be economists, merely doing a compulsory course or two in the subject as part of a business or commerce degree. For those students, their one or two economics papers are their only exposure to the discipline, and in this respect, CORE’s application of economics tools to real-world problems fulfils the education and engagement criteria in a way some current approaches do not.

New Zealand

Sam Bowles and Wendy Carlin were invited to New Zealand by The Treasury and the Victoria University of Wellington. In December 2016 they ran workshops in Auckland and Wellington to which academics from all New Zealand University Economics Departments were invited. Sam and Wendy also met with some public sector officials. This was followed up with an invitation to Sam and Wendy, to join (via Skype) a special session on CORE at the New Zealand Association of Economists Conference in July 2017 in Wellington. They did, and provided an update on CORE.

Some at Victoria University, including Professors Arthur Grimes, Adrian Slack, and Girol Karacaoglu, have either started using, or are considering using, CORE material in Public Policy and Economics courses. In our view, there is potentially significant benefits for our students and for New Zealand at large in pursuing this and extending the use of CORE across New Zealand universities. These benefits could accrue, by way of example, through improvements in the quality of our graduates and, through them, in the quality of analysis in the public sector. An additional, extremely valuable, by-product of this effort would be more and better collaboration across New Zealand universities towards serving the best interests of New Zealand.

]]>An unlikely political footballhttp://briefingpapers.co.nz/an-unlikely-political-football/
Mon, 20 Nov 2017 17:05:10 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1505Economist Alan Maynard coined the term ‘redisorganisation’ for constant restructurings in the British health system; in New Zealand, the public sector gets restructured so often it has been described as ‘almost an addiction’. Often the tension is between specialisation and coordination, that is, between having several smaller, single-focussed agencies versus combining functions into one agency for easier coordination. The new government looks set to continue this tradition, promising to undo a number of the previous government’s organisational reforms. The big one will be separating out the component parts of the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI): agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food safety and biosecurity. Some of these changes will be good ones – the small but important Food Safety should never have been bundled together with the large and powerful Agriculture.

The issues aren’t just about size, but separating out conflicts of interest, and recognising the loss than happens to organisations with strong professional cultures when they are submerged in large conglomerate agencies where the dominant culture is a managerial not professional one.

If the Labour Party’s election manifesto is honoured, an unlikely political football – Archives New Zealand – is about to be kicked to the opposite end of the field. The manifesto contains a section on ‘public services’, and within that, a section devoted to Internal Affairs. This is notable because with the exception of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), no other government agencies are named.

– Commit to Archives New Zealand and the National Library being re-established as independent and separate entities outside the Department of Internal Affairs

– Investigate the National Archivist being an Officer of Parliament.

Archives New Zealand has a long history with the Department of Internal Affairs. It started life there in 1948, where it languished, little seen and under-resourced until the mid-1990s, when it came to the attention of public sector reformers. What followed were a turbulent six years of reform proposals and actual reforms, each one hard on the heels of the one before, and several of the proposals attracting legal action. In the 1990s, watching the circus around the Archives, Michael Cullen argued in a conference speech that the organisation should not be subject to continuous review and change:

The policy issues involved are not, and should not be, matters of continuous revision and controversy. The underlying principles … have considerable durability and permanency. It is, indeed, of the essence of the archival role that it is about permanence and solidity, a firm historical, legal, institutional and constitutional rock to which the record of government and public affairs can be tethered.[i]

In government following the 1999 election, Cullen – a former historian who knew something about the policy area – and Archives Minister Marion Hobbs, reformed the Archives in a way that put professional values at its heart. The National Archives was renamed Archives New Zealand, given its independence from the Department of Internal Affairs (becoming a stand-alone department), a budget increase, and new legislation, the Public Records Act 2005.

And there things should have stayed.

And yet one of the first public management reviews launched following the 2008 election was into Archives New Zealand. In 2010, as a result of this review, the Archives was put back into Internal Affairs. Now it seems, it will yo-yo back to independence. The proposal to ‘Investigate the National Archivist being an Officer of Parliament’ is an attempt to entrench the main powers and functions of the Archives as answerable to parliament not government, which will also make it harder for upcoming governments and the State Services Commission to undo this reform.

Why should anyone care about this? We should care partly because the frequent restructuring in the archives policy area is illustrative of the frequent and wasteful restructuring of public agencies, an activity that consumes huge resources with little evaluation of their success. Explicit costs of restructuring – change managers, redundancies, rebranding and new hires – all appear in the accounts, but implicit costs do not. Implicit costs include opportunity costs, such as the loss of productivity resulting from staff preoccupation with the restructuring, rather than attending to their core work. Decreases in morale and loss of institutional knowledge are also not accounted for, enabling the costs of restructuring to be downplayed and the benefits over-sold. All the while large important policy problems (such as health and housing) go unsolved.

The restructuring binge Archives New Zealand has been subjected to goes back to 1994, when a consultant recommended a policy–purchaser–provider split for the organisation, as was the fashion of the times. But the times were changing and so shortly after, new reforms were proposed instead. Mostly these changes were to solve problems of the State Services Commission or the Department of Internal Affairs – and did nothing to advance the professional archiving goals of the Archives.

And this is at the heart of the problem in many state sector reforms: managerial priorities dominate professional values and the needs of the actual function of the organisation. Archivists are motivated by a strong professional ethos about the purpose of their work, and their preferred organisational design and placement within the wider state sector reflects the best way to achieve these professional goals. Because their professional values are stable over time, their preferred organisational design has stayed relatively stable, too. Meanwhile, the goals of the ‘manager class’ change every time public sector management trends change: from single focus agencies to larger multi-function agencies, to networks and joined up governance and a recognition of systems. In a few years’ time, it will be something else. In 1994 reviewers scolded the Archives because staff acted collegially with professional values at the heart of decisionmaking. In the 2009 review led by the State Services Commission, Archives New Zealand was described as a well-functioning department, but it was criticised for focusing on archiving instead of aligning itself with the [executive] government’s strategic priorities. This misses the point of archiving: as a policy area, it is about stability and continuity. The official archives of New Zealand should not change its priorities every time the government’s strategic priorities change. Additionally, it ignores the constitutional function of an official archive.

Archives New Zealand is the regulator of government record making, keeping, and destruction. It has an important constitutional role by providing the foundation of democratic accountability: records provide evidence of government activity and of citizens’ relationship with the state. Records underpin the Official Information Act, the work of the Ombudsman, Courts and commissions of enquiry. While the proposed enquiry into abuse in state care will presumably include personal accounts, records will also be used where possible to establish places, times, names and practises. It can be argued, from this perspective, that the Chief Archivist and the Archives should not be organised and rearranged at the whim of a Minister or the State Services Commission, but report directly to the whole parliament, as the Auditor-General does.

In 2010 I wrote against the inclusion of Archives New Zealand into the Department of Internal Affairs, and those arguments still stand. I also submitted to the Select Committee considering this change, pointing out that international best practise advocates stand-alone status.

Michael Cullen’s reforms were almost uniformly positive for archiving in New Zealand. In hindsight, choosing department status for the new agency in 2000 left it vulnerable to further meddling. Hopefully the organisational reforms promised by this government will be the last.

[i] Michael Cullen, New Zealand Archives Should Stay Separate, Speech to the 1998 Archives and Records Association of New Zealand conference, printed in Archifacts, April 1999, p. 55. Italics in original.

]]>Dividing Relationship Property – Time for Change?http://briefingpapers.co.nz/dividing-relationship-property-time-for-change/
Mon, 13 Nov 2017 17:07:50 +0000http://briefingpapers.co.nz/?p=1484The Property (Relationships) Act 1976 (PRA) tells couples how to divide their property when they separate or if one partner dies. It affects almost every New Zealander over their lifetime.

When it first became law in 1976, the PRA challenged and helped redefine the role of women in society. Parliament amended it in 2001 to include to de facto relationships and same-sex relationships. The Act has both reflected and shaped our values about relationships. Yet New Zealand in 2017 looks very different to New Zealand when the law first passed.

Some of the changes have been dramatic. The Law Commission has published a Study Paper looking at some of those changes.

New Zealand is now more diverse. Māori, Pacific and Asian populations have more than doubled since 1976. Children are now ten times more likely than older New Zealanders to identify with more than one ethnicity.

New Zealand’s marriage rate has dropped and de facto relationships are more common. In 2013, 1 in 5 couples said they were in a de facto relationship, compared to less than 1 in 10 in 1986. Nearly half of all children born last year were born to parents not married or in a civil union.

There is little research about people re-partnering, but it is becoming more common, as are stepfamilies. We know that a third of marriages are re-marriages.

More New Zealanders are living in extended family households. Family living arrangements often change. A recent study suggests that only a few children live their whole childhood in a household containing only nuclear family members.

So the question for us is whether, amongst all this change, the PRA still reflects New Zealanders values and expectations.

We are raising many questions with New Zealanders over the coming months. Here, we want to mention three of those big questions:

Who should the Act apply to?

We want to know whether the Act is capturing the appropriate relationships. It applies to marriages, civil unions and de facto relationships. Does the Act use the right factors to decide what a de facto relationship is? And does it give them the right weight?

The PRA defines a de facto relationship as two people who “live together as a couple”. It lists specific matters that show whether the two people were a couple. The matters include:

the length of the relationship;

whether the partners shared the same house;

whether the partners had a sexual relationship;

how much the partners were financially dependent or interdependent;

how the partners owned, used and acquired property;

how much the partners were committed to a shared life;

how the partners cared and supported their children;

how the partners performed household duties; and

the reputation and public aspects of the relationship.

But some people prefer to keep their finances separate even though they live as a couple. This may be because one or both partners have children from previous relationships and want to remain financially responsible for their own children. Should the PRA apply to such relationships?

Normally, the PRA says couples should share their property equally. The PRA covers most de facto relationships of three years or longer. We are asking if three years is the right time at which de facto couples who separate should share their property, or is a longer time fairer?

What property should the Act cover?

Relationship property will usually include:

property used by the family, like the family home, furniture, cars; and

property either partner acquires during the relationship, like savings and superannuation (including KiwiSaver).

Separate property is all other property, but includes:

property a person owned before the relationship; and

any gift or inheritance a partner receives.

If a family uses a partner’s separate property, that property will normally become relationship property.

Some people say that the PRA forces people to divide property they did not get as a couple. For example, people have told us when one partner brings a home into the relationship but the other does not, it is unfair to divide the value of the house if the relationship ends.

Should we change how we define relationship property to include only property the partners get during the relationship? This would affect the amount of property available to divide. It would move away from a long-established focus on families’ use of property.

The role of children in an Act about adults

Many children’s parents separate. Almost half of all divorces in 2016 involved children, affecting over 6,000 children under 17.

When parents split up, the way they divide their property affects their children. It can affect their accommodation, their standard of living, where they go to school and their ability to maintain relationships with family, whānau, friends and community.

The PRA refers to the interests of children. But we have found, that in practice, the law seldom takes children’s interests into account in relationship property matters.

When dividing a couple’s property, the court can make orders that can benefit children. For example, the court can put some of the parents’ property to one side for the children. Sometimes, the court can postpone the time at which the parents divide the relationship property.

But the court rarely makes these orders. Parents rarely ask the court to make them. The court can be reluctant to take property away from parents or to prevent parents from getting their share of property straight away.

So, a key question we face is whether the PRA should take greater account of children’s interests.

New Zealanders’ relationships and the way we form families have changed. There have been so many changes that it is time to look hard at the Property (Relationships) Act. Does the law still reflect our expectations – does it allow us divide property fairly and simply when relationships end?